Articles

Jeremy Deller

“Genuine boredom… bloody hell, I remember boredom. It’s amazing! Sunday afternoon, on a wet Sunday afternoon, that’s when you sort of took to your bedroom and got your books out or something.”

Sukhdev Sandhu

Hossein Amanat

“One gets very impressed by the forms in Iranian architecture. One of the greatest messages is the sequence of volumes: how an outdoor space, say, can give you an impression of enclosure, and then you come to a smaller space, or a lower or higher space, the interrelations of different volumes and proportions — the time it takes to walk through, the amount of light you experience as you pass…”

Benjamin Tiven

Rokni Haerizadeh’s The Reign of Winter

When the sheets are all sewn together, the work will represent an unlikely, if not maudlin, take on this exploding piñata of privilege.

Negar Azimi

Tongues: Glossolalia going viral

Amid the rising, falling tide of gobbledygook the preacher would suddenly start to shout in Somali.

Nimco Mahamud-Hassan

The Imaginary Elsewhere: How not to think about diasporic art

The political import of these works has less to do with representation than with the pleasures and perils of storytelling, the effort to recast the everyday into mythical structures that speak to universal desires.

Media Farzin

Aliens: The Arabs of Bosnia and the War on Terror

Banners like Non-Alignment and Islam can be taken down and rolled up as circumstances dictate, but people often get left behind.

Darryl Li

Gulfiwood: Culture and society in South Asian Arabia

There is a body of cinema about life in the Gulf, that is consumed by the majority of the population of the Gulf, that requires no special pleading or state subsidy to exist — the popular culture of the Arab working class, most of whom happen to be Indian.

Sudarshan Purohit

Model UNESCO: A Roundtable: With Sarah Rifky, Nadia Ayari, Annabel Daou, Ranya Husami, and Mahmoud Khaled

American participation in the International Cairo Biennale has been wrongheadedly PC, expensive, beautiful, boring, and/or outright controversial.

Bidoun

Imprisoned Airs: A conversation with Salar Abdoh

In life, Reza Abdoh inspired all manner of fantastical tales.

Daniel Mufson

Haj to Utopia

They were drawn from a seemingly incoherent mix of -isms: pan-Islamism, Irish republicanism and Bolshevism.

Hussein Omar

The Colonel

In 2006, I was asked to address an audience in Tehran on the novels of Orhan Pamuk.

Christopher de Bellaigue

Notes on a Century

Alongside these formidable accomplishments, there is a Bernard Lewis who is reviled by leftish academia and who is surrounded by dubious sycophants.

Issandr El Amrani

Jumana Manna: The apparatus of the game

Here, the touch of her swim coach’s hand can stand in for all the sexual slippage of a woman coming of age in water.

Kate Sutton

A Very Still Life: Jack Kevorkian and the muse of genocide

Quite at home in the museum, the severed head of a young woman dangles by her hair a few feet from the reception desk.

Anna Della Subin

Aleph Null: Shridhar Bapat’s undergrounds

People remember Shridhar with regret because that’s how they remember themselves — their disillusionments and disappointments, their selling out or failing to sell, their settling down and surviving.

Alexander Keefe

Mona Eltahawy

“We went on hajj soon after we arrived in Saudi, and I was groped beside the Kaaba, as I was kissing the black stone — the heavenly white stone that was tainted black by the sins of humanity.”

Yasmine El Rashidi

Monocle #49: SOFT POWER IN ITS OWN 555 WORDS

The world’s only superpower is public opinion.

Bidoun

Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Uneasy listening

In December of 1985, James Vance and Raymond Belknap, age twenty and eighteen, respectively, shot themselves in the face after many hours of beer drinking and dope smoking in a church parking lot in the town of Sparks, Nevada.

Negar Azimi

Franziska Pierwoss: Car talk

The funny thing about Franziska Pierwoss is that despite spending much of the past six months immersed in the intricacies of Beiruti car culture — from body kits and butterfly doors to the ups and downs of drifting — she doesn’t actually know how to drive.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

The Angry, Angry Arab

As’ad AbuKhalil is a serious-minded political scientist and an erudite commentator on Middle Eastern politics.

Babak Radboy, E.P. Licursi